I have a series of blog posts going up on Dataversity.net. The introduction went up a few weeks ago and now 2 new rants have been added. Head over there to check them out and leave comments. I love when people leave comments — even if the comments disagree. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that performance tuning is something we learn by sharing experiences with others. It’s not something that one can apply a bunch of formulas and rules to. So post away.

Perhaps what the data profession needs is a series of top-up courses, to be reviewed every couple of years. Maybe what we need is an intervention to help people understand the why normalization is even a topic in design. I think this would make for a wonderful lunchtime presentation. Perhaps your boss could even buy lunch. This presentation wouldn’t be the how of normalization, but the whys and why nots. Mastering the normal forms is fairly easy. Understanding which one to use for a specific solution is the hard part. The more your teammates understand the whys, the more likely they are to going to support your efforts.